Calling Community History Medievalists!
As part of the Community History Stall at the Regius Anniversary Showcase, Dr. Elizabeth Gemmill from the Oxford University Department for Continuing Education gave information on how to research Mediaeval History in your community. This blog post explores this with helpful tips on how you can research the Mediaeval period in your community.
Calling Community History Medievalists!
By far the majority of what seem to be modern-day settlements of city, suburb, town or village, actually have their origins in the medieval period – or are older yet. The clues can be in the place names, the standing buildings or their remnants, or the features of the landscape. But how do you find out more about your community’s medieval past? You may be a newcomer to the area wanting to find out more; or you may have lived there all your life and always wondered. You may be doing a project for school. You may just want to know. Whatever your reasons, this blog puts together some freely available resources that may enable you to research the past of your own local community.
Getting started
As a start, look at the history of your locality in the Victoria County History for Oxfordshire. The Victoria County History was started in 1899 as a nationwide project to provide an encyclopaedic history of every county in England. The VCH for Oxfordshire is proudly ongoing – to date there are twenty volumes in print of which eighteen are available online at British History Online: https://www.british-history.ac.uk/series/victoria-county-history-oxfordshire
By the twelfth century, the parish structure that we know today was essentially in place. There have certainly been some changes, and the medieval parish was not a unit of local government as it became from the sixteenth century on. For medievalists, though, the Victoria County History volumes containing the parish histories and the histories of the religious houses in the county should be especially useful as you explore what your locality may have been like in the medieval period – who owned it, what there was by way of farming and industry, which buildings, roads, and other infrastructure may have been there. What the VCH also does is to give you leads to other primary sources that you may want to consult for yourself.
What are primary sources?
When historians talk about ‘primary sources’ they refer to documents and other materials made at the time under study. These are the evidence of what things were like at the time and are therefore quite different from the later commentaries made by historians. Of course, documents weren’t usually written with the interests and concerns of later generations in mind, and so they often don’t answer our questions directly. So, that’s actually the start of our journey as historians: primary sources inspire us to think in new ways about the past, and prompt us to ‘read between the lines’ of the texts that we are looking at.
Written primary sources for our medieval past are surprisingly plentiful even though most people could not read or write. Most records were made by, or for the benefit of, powerful institutions: the royal government, the Church, or large landlords. What that means for us as historians is that most written records were made ‘about’ people, rather than ‘by’ them. But of course that doesn’t mean that we cannot use them to find out about the lives of everyday people. Indeed, that is where your historical imagination steps in.
Primary sources in print: Oxfordshire Record Society
If you would like to know about the kind of records that were made in the medieval period, a good place to start is the website of Oxfordshire Record Society which publishes written primary sources relating to the county. Its publications up to 2017 are available to download at no cost, and include medieval Oxfordshire wills, deeds, surveys, judicial, manorial and borough records. The publications are listed here: https://oxrecsoc.org/publications
Who lived in your locality in the eleventh century?
A unique source for looking at land settlement and use in the medieval period is the Domesday survey commissioned by William I in 1086. The Open Domesday website allows you to search for a person or place, to read a summary of the Domesday entry, to see an image of the Domesday text in which it features, and to explore a map: https://opendomesday.org/
Among William the Conqueror’s reasons for commissioning the survey was to assess for taxation. Medieval kings were generally rather inquisitive about their subjects’ wealth… but they weren’t the only ones.
How wealthy was your church?
Medieval popes were very interested in the property of the Church. The wealth of the church was in large measure made up of tithes, that is, a tenth of people’s yearly produce that was due to the local parish. If you’d like to know how rich your local church was in the thirteenth century, you can look it up on the online version of the ecclesiastical tax assessment made in 1291-2 under the authority of Pope Nicholas IV. You can also find out who the patron of the church was ( that is, who had the right to nominate the next incumbent), what the grid reference for the church is, which other churches were in the vicinity, and the assessment procedures: https://www.dhi.ac.uk/taxatio/
Was there a market or fair here?
Of course, not all trade took place in a fair or market, but for details about Oxfordshire’s many medieval markets and fairs up to 1516, have a look at https://archives.history.ac.uk/gazetteer/gazweb2.html
The National Archives Discovery Catalogue
If you’d like to find out about the original, unpublished documents relating to your community, The National Archives Discovery catalogue enables you to undertake a search including all registered UK archive repositories. Type in the name of your local town or village at: https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/
Oxfordshire History Centre
Oxfordshire History Centre at St Luke’s Church, Cowley Road holds a number of medieval deeds, court rolls, royal inquiries, parish, and borough records: https://www.oxfordshire.gov.uk/oxfordshirehistory.
To search for your community’s medieval records type in the name at Heritage Gateway: https://heritagesearch.oxfordshire.gov.uk/
Oxfordshire Architectural and Historical Society
The Oxfordshire Architectural and Historical Society (OAHS) dates back to 1839. Its website provides details of events and excursions: https://www.oahs.org.uk/index.php
OAHS publishes the journal Oxoniensia, which publishes articles relating to the architecture, archaeology, and history of the city and county of Oxfordshire. Volumes from 1936 to 2023 are available freely online: https://oxoniensia.org/oxo_vollist.php
Other resources for community and local historians
The University’s Department for Continuing Education Library has produced a guide to freely available online resources for local history: https://libguides.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/conted-localhistory/free-online-resources
The website of the Historical Association, a charity which promotes the study and learning of history at all levels, has a number of freely available podcasts, including on medieval topics: https://www.history.org.uk/podcasts/list
Oxfordshire Local History Association promotes the study of local history and acts as an umbrella organisation for local history groups. For details of your local history organisation as well as OLHA’s events and publications, go to: https://olha.org.uk/
Elizabeth Gemmill
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